Porn Sites Safer Than Music and Shopping Sites, Study Shows

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Pornographic websites are a favorite target of cybercriminals
looking to spread nasty malware, but in the realm of dangerous
domains, they're far safer than business, shopping and music
sites, and, especially, personal blogs.

In
Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report, the security
firm tracked the categories of websites most frequently exploited
in 2011. At the bottom of the list were pornography sites, of
which only 2.4 percent were exploited by cybercriminals. The
statistic comes into clearer relief when compared with the top
offender, blogs, of which 19.8 percent were infected, as well as
personal hosted sites (15.6 percent), and business and economy
websites (10 percent).

"It is interesting to note that websites hosting
adult/pornographic content are not in the top five, but ranked
10th," Symantec researchers wrote.

But why are pornography sites, which make up such a huge part of
the Internet, not as dangerous, at least compared with education,
business or entertainment websites? Symantec said it's all about
the money — and keeping the customer happy.

"Pornographic website owners already make money from the Internet
and, as a result, have a vested interest in
keeping their sites malware-free — it's not good for repeat
business."

It's likely that blogs and personal sites were the most infected
because their operators use outdated and unpatched versions of
the popular blogging software WordPress. In April, Kaspersky
Lab reported that the
Flashback Trojan, a Mac-specific piece of malware, had spread
via rigged WordPress blogs and compromised more than 600,000
machines.